Monthly Archives: July 2018

Let’s start with background info: my father is both an engineering physicist and a tech entrepreneur. Add to that Olympic athlete and type A+ personality, and you have a world-class Explainer. My dad is so good at Explaining Things nobody even knew existed, much less needed explaining, that some time ago I started a Dad Explains It video collection.

On the Explaining front, Dad and Aamaa turn out to be a match made in heaven. Because Aamaa requires explanations of everything from traffic lights to faucets, and Dad has a limitless endurance – some might even say compulsion – to leave no beautiful creation of the universe Unexplained. This is extremely handy for all of us. We girls (Bishnu and Mom and I) just aim them at each other and go about our business.

Over the weekend, we’ve made a family visit to a high rise apartment being constructed in downtown Bethesda. Aamaa is curious about all forms of construction. Like my nephew Jonah, she presses her nose to the window every time we drive past something being built. I decide this comes in the same vein as knowing the origins of food and other things that in Aamaa’s world travel very short distances from creation to use. There are comparatively few things in her life that just appear with no traceable origins–I mean, back in the day, Aamaa and Hadjur Aamaa used to walk to the border of Tibet with baskets to trade for salt. Even modern concrete houses in Kaski are constructed without machinery using materials readily available in the local environment. So a suburban high rise presents a mystery on many levels. How is it all put together? Where does it come from?

First we stop at the building company, where we are provided hard hats. We all agree that Aamaa kills in the hard hat. (She has to sign a visitor agreement, and since Aamaa can’t write her name, she uses a kind of plus sign – it is always strange to see Aamaa’s incredibly dextrous hands fumble unfamiliarly with a pen.) Then we head across the street to a service elevator that is in place just for purpose of constructing the high-rise. When Aamaa and I were in Kathmandu a few weeks ago, we visited the third-floor rooftop of a mall. “Holy crap this is high up,” Aamaa proclaimed. “All the buildings in Kathmandu are enormous.”

“Push the button for floor seventeen!” Mom cries as we enter the service elevator.

Aamaa grasps Mom with both hands and the elevator lifts us off the ground with a jolt.

We wander the half-built highrise apartment, whose main walls are still open to the sky. Aamaa and Dad are transformed in to a superhero team patrolling Gotham City: there are things that need explaining EVERYWHERE. The space is divided by empty wall frames which have mammoth-size pallets of insulation stacked up between them. Dad and Aamaa commence an epic geek-out over insulation and plaster, and then shift their nerdfest to the feat of having transported the insulation – and the rest of this stuff – seventeen floors above the ground. Where will the plumbing go? And electricity?

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The construction company employee treats us to a view of the roof. Aamaa has surprised us all with an ominously keen sense of direction in this unfamiliar world. The first few days after she arrived, we were driving around in Connecticut when we approached the drug store on the corner of my street. “This is your street, right?” Aamaa asked, before I had made the turn. I was absolutely baffled that she could get oriented so quickly when most of the visual landmarks are foreign objects with no inherent meaning, like a drug store. Now, on the roof of the high-rise apartment, Aamaa surveys the city below, which she has spent some time touring with Bishnu and me. She extends one finger toward the top of some buildings.

A few days later we went to go visit Great Falls and the Tow Path and along the Potomac River, where my parents used to take us for hikes on the weekends. Back then we had a special rock bench that my brother and I “discovered,” and which was, for purposes of eating a picnic of peanut butter sandwiches, the target of every summer expedition we made to Great Falls. My dad and I have both rowed many miles on the Potomac River, and on the fourth of July our family would come to the boat house and put on smelly life jackets and watch the fireworks from canoes on the water. This area is part of the circulatory system of our family. We pulled in to the parking lot at Great Falls with Aamaa.

For some reason that now I can’t completely put together, one of the first things to occur was that Aamaa and Dad got to trading their shade-producing accessories. I’ll just leave that there.

The only major bodies of water near Kaskikot are the Gandaki River and Phewa Lake. The first, we can cross through the riverbed in our flip flops unless a flood or unusually extreme rain has come through. The second can be crossed by paddle boat in about half an hour. So Great Falls was…great.

And now another confession. For all the years that my family has spent at Great Falls, for all the rowing and firework-watching and picnicking…my brother and I somehow both grew up thinking this was the “Toe Path.”

I know. It’s bad. Because of the Explaining that is required with Aamaa there, this comes up in conversation.

“What?” my dad says, with the displeasure of a Master Explainer who has realized, at a time when his offspring are grown-ass adults raising children and trying to survive in the world on their own, that something so basic, and so explainable, and so important to the family history as the tow path, NEVER. GOT. EXPLAINED.

Dad explains the history of the C & O Canal as a trade route, complete with a detailed explanation of the the locking mechanisms that allowed canal boats to move upriver. And, swept up in all this Explaining, Dad finally breaks out in to song. This is a thing that happens sometimes.

For about a year now, the Government of Nepal has been undergoing a decentralization of power. The country has been divided in to five provinces and outfitted with new government employees at the state level. It’s an exciting moment for a project like ours, which is aimed at capacity building in the government health system. Right now entire tier of government in Nepal is literally undergoing construction for the first time.

In the mean time, a large number of essential items are not yet decided even as the new government is deploying its duties. The desks are purchased and people have been assigned to sit behind them – literally – but exactly what these people are responsible for and how their responsibilities are to be executed is still a work in progress. Many operational policies are still not in place, and decision-making power isn’t yet clearly defined between different levels of government. Basically, we are in a car that is being built while rolling down the highway. You’ve probably been there too, right? And I accept that many people would find this alarming.

These people, however, find it AWESOME.

This a great time to be a grassroots organization in Nepal that has been working on health care with previously less-empowered leaders in villages. Oddly enough, Jevaia Foundation now has a lot of specialized knowledge on a key primary health issue that few if any other organizations are working on in Nepal. We have policy ideas that we’ve already modeled in multiple health posts, and there are elected officials in lower levels of government with an interest in getting this model supported by the ministry of health. And right around the corner from us in the capital of Province #4, the policies, budgetary headings, and guidelines that will decide these matters are currently being created.

Our hope is that in coming months, we’ll be able to play a role in influencing some of the new health policy. Currently oral health care in Nepal is available almost exclusively in private practice. The ministry of health doesn’t even have a budget heading for oral health at the primary care level, and in the villages where we work, leaders have cobbled funds from other budget categories to run dental clinics in their Health Posts. In the new provincial system, we’re hoping to organize local officials and communities to demand the creation of oral health budgets from the Ministry of Health at the province level. Cool, right?

So even though everything’s a bit weird here at the moment, a time of change and uncertainty is of course always, potentially, a time of heightened opportunity. It is certainly a million times better than an unyielding stasis, as anyone who has been in one of those surely knows.

Now let’s bring this all back down to the ground for a second, in my home village of Kaskikot, where the newly elected village leaders reopened the dental clinic we started…which had been closed for SIX YEARS. (Here’s the Washington Post story about our handover of the Kaskikot clinic in 2013.) The new Kaskikot clinic is fully integrated in to the Health Post and financed by the village government. Patients register in the main building and then take a registration ticket to the dental room. Data on patient flow and treatments provided is maintained just like all other primary care services delivered in the government Health Post. Our job is now confined to monitoring quality of care and technical support. It’s AMAZING.

In order to garner backing for this example and its variations in other villages, we’ve been hard at work over the last few weeks meeting people behind desks in the new province government, and then meeting with other people they suggest we meet with. It’s so refreshing to talk with these newly appointed officials and to brainstorm with folks outside government who, like us, have been chipping away at sticky issues for a long time and are trying to sort out what the new system means for these bigger goals. The confusion of the moment is offset by what feels to us like a sense of possibility and movement. At the same time, it’s important that everyone carry on with a grand performance of confidence, even though nobody is sure what is going on. So, ok, we’re doing that.

For example, recently I thought to invite a couple folks we’d met up to Kaskikot to see the dental clinic one Sunday. They agreed to come. I immediately began worrying over how to make sure that they’d be there on a busy day. The Kaskikot clinic is generally seeing about 8-15 patients a day, which is getting close to full capacity…but it’s also the busy planting season, and it’s raining, and….and anyway, it would just be a bummer if we invited Important People to our clinic and there were not a lot of patients when they arrived. Maintaining confidence under construction means pulling out all the stops.

Fortunately, the Kaskikot clinic runs on Sundays, and I spend Saturdays at home in Kaskikot. I decided to invest in some advertising. Here’s where we move this story from Important Offices to Aamaa’s Kitchen.

“We’re going to the clinic tomorrow morning,” I informed Didi and Aidan and Pascal over dinner. They were in Kaski last week for school vacation. Didi protested that she needed to leave early morning to cut grass for the buffalo because Aamaa’s leg has been sore. Also, she pointed out, What if it rains later in the day? I told her I was 100% certain that it never rains on Sundays and that, in conclusion, we were all to leave for dental exams at 9:30am sharp.

On Sunday morning I started my rounds early, at Saano Didi and Saraswoti’s houses. Nobody looked like they’d been planning on a dental checkup after breakfast. “C’mon guys, we’ll go together, it will be fun. Malika Didi is coming,” I begged. With dignity, of course. For the greater good. Then, walking down the ridge toward Deurali, I ran in to Mahendra sauntering home.

“I need you to come to get a dental checkup today,” I said.

“A dental checkup?”

“At the health post. There are some important people coming to see it.”

“Ok Laura didi.”

“Really? You wouldn’t lie to me.”

“I wouldn’t lie to you Laura didi.”

“Hey and bring some of your friends,” I added, testing my luck. Mahendra has a posse of bros that move as a pack.

“Ok Laura didi.”

Mahendra and Saila

“Really?” It seemed suspicious.

“I’ll be there Laura didi.”

“Around 11,“ I said, and continued down the ridge.

I came to the yard of Saili Bouju, who’s married to our local shaman, Bauta Dai, our local shaman. Since I pass their front yard every time I walk home from the main road, we check in pretty regularly. When I’d arrived on Friday, we had already made a plan to go to the dental clinic Sunday morning.

“Saili Bouju, we’re going for a dental checkup today, right?”

“Yes, yes Laura,” she assured me in her deep raspy voice.

“I’ll be by at 9:45,” I said. “With Malika didi.”

I continued up the walk to the the next two houses, where I made my pitch to Barat’s two sisters-in-law and their families over tea. Ambika Bouju happened to stop by as I was rinsing my teacup.

“Ambika Bouju, come for a dental checkup today.”

“Hey, I’ve been meaning to do that,” she replied, to my great happiness. “I need to take my son in.”

“Today’s the day! There are some Important People coming from Pokhara to see it. We need a crowd.”

“Ok, I’ll be there,” Ambika Bouju agreed.

Out at the main road I came upon Amadev bouju in her yard. She can’t hear very well. “Bouju, let’s go to the health post today,” I said. She smiled and nodded and said, “Sure, Laura.” She’s an overall positive person.

“Really?”

“Ok, ok,” Amadev Bouju said.

“To get your teeth checked.”

“Yep!”

I had a feeling we might not be talking about the same thing, so I hopped down in to the yard to discuss the matter at a shorter distance. “COME TO THE HEALTH POST WITH ME TO GET A DENTAL EXAM,” I repeated.

“Oh! Dental exam? My teeth don’t hurt.”

“A checkup is important!” I proclaimed. Amadev Bouju rolled over fairly easily. She said she’d meet us at the clinic.

I made my way toward Butu bouju’s house. Back in the day, when her daughters were younger, we used to have sleepovers and make chocolate chip pancakes over the fire. Butu bouju was out in the yard and tried to impose more tea upon my already full-of-tea stomach. I was delighted to find out that she’d been thinking to bring her grandkids to the health post for a dental checkup at some point. “I’ll be by with Malika didi to pick you up,” I said, making sure that Didi would have no out now that I’d advertised her all over the village, and headed home.

“I’ve rounded up most of the people in Deurali,” I announced over breakfast. Didi replied that she was going to cut grass. I countered withthe importance of oral hygeine, and of my schemes, and how she loves me. And so on.

We set off mid-morning. Narayan and Amrit, who over to play with Aidan and Pascal, were rounded up and I shuttled the whole gaggle along the edge of the cornfield. They disappeared in to the tall stalks and I turned around to make sure that Didi was following close behind.

Somehow, by the time we got to Govinda Dai’s house, I was already alone again. Didi had peeled off to go retrieve Butu Bouju. Saili Bouju said she had a headache and would go another time, and only after much cajoling said that she’d meet us there in a little while, which I was pretty sure was a way of pacifying me and sending me on my way. When I passed Ambika Bouju’s house, she was nowhere to be found, and even though her daughter said she’d be up the road shortly, it seemed improbable. All four boys—Pascal, Aidan, Narayan and Amrit—had taken off ahead of me down the road while I was trying to recapture our patients, and by the time I reached Govinda’s house in Dophare they were nowhere in sight. I walked in to Govinda’s yard alone, not seven minutes after mission launch.

As Govinda dai readied his umbrella, I looked in the road and saw that Mahendra had appeared out of thin air, with a friend. They were carelessly posted by the side of the road, sullen and awesome as usual.

“I told you I was coming, Laura didi,” Mahendra said with casual authority. “You guys go ahead. We’ll be along.”

Near Maula, we caught up with Aidan and Narayan. “Where are Pascal and Amrit?” I asked. “THEY WENT HOME,” Aidan declared triumphantly, beaming. I sighed. Oh well. “I’m going to call your mom,” I said, and took out my phone to dial Didi, who was missing in action. “I HAVE MOMMY’S PHONE,” Aidan proclaimed ecstatically. “IF YOU CALL MOMMY IT WILL RING RIGHT HERE!”

I thought morosely that Didi and Butu Bouju most likely got to chatting and weren’t coming along.

We arrived at the Health Post in a thick fog. The previous night’s rain had left everything squishy and slick. Durga, the clinic assistant, was just getting through the morning disinfection and setup process. The technician Dipendra was nowhere to be found. It was 10:40 and our visitors where scheduled to arrive at 11.

10:50. Dipendra rolled up on his bike.

10:53. Pascal and Amrit came tumbling out of the fog through the gate to the Health Post complex. They tore across the lawn, jumped over the wall, and went back out in to the road to play by the pond until called for their exams.

10:57. Didi materialized from the fog at the gate. Behind her, Butu Bouju was walking and chatting with her grandkids, like spirits emerging out of a cloud. I blinked. There was Saili Bouju behind them.

11:10. A line of non-recruited folks had taken tickets and were awaiting appointments. The bench outside was full, not just with my neighbors, but with the natural flow of weekly patients.

11:15. Ambika Bouju arrived with her son.

11:20. Mahendra and his bros sauntered in to the yard.

11:30. Our two visitors showed up to find a full clinic with a long line of adults, children and elderly patients sitting out a roughly 40 minute wait. Inside the clinic room, Dipendra demonstrated the treatment planning form that was developed during our last professional development in December. I pointed out our infection control protocol on the wall and other features of the clinic protocol that we’ve added to the Health Post setting, like floor coverings, dress, tray numbers and documentation.

We retreated to the local government building next door to talk about our next steps at the province level. By the time we came back outside to get in a car back to Pokhara, it was about 12:00, and the line outside the clinic has grown even further.

“Saili Bouju!” I call across the lawn.

“I told you I was coming!” Saili Bouju shouted back.

*

(p.s. I have no idea what’s going on with my weird knome-hairdo in this photo)

With the Nepal government undergoing a major restructuring, a big goal for us this summer is to figure out how the newly formed provincial government works and establish relationships with influential decision-makers. We’re just getting started, and as I’ve described elsewhere, so is the government: most of the province-level officials are quite new to their desks, and in many cases the scope and processes of their jobs are still being decided.

So let me give you an idea of how this works. Honestly, this is my real life. I begin with a friend of mine in Kathmandu, who I was introduced to through an organization that gave us a grant a few years ago. This friend refers me to a colleague of hers, who I’ll call Sam, who works inside the new Province #4 government office in Pokhara as a representative of a big nonprofit doing policy work on another topic. So Sam is not exactly a government employee, but he’s connected to people in the Province office because he works in the building, and most happily, he is someone I can ring on his cell phone. I set up an appointment. It’s our first trip to the Province offices and we’ll just have to go meet Sam and see where we get.

Are you with me so far?

Muna and I walk about a mile from our office in burning July sun, and meet Sam in his office at the new Province building. Sam is a friendly, energetic and smart guy, and he begins to orient us to the structure of the Province government (we tried to google it–maybe you’ll have better luck). He combs through our present bureaucratic challenge: obtaining official endorsement for a workshop we want to host to train new dental technicians (who will of course work in Government Health Posts). In the absence of clear procedures, we mull over who best to take this to next. Sam makes a call to the Province Health Coordinator, an obvious choice, but the Health Coordinator is out today.

Eventually – and this is only possible because Sam is helping us, and because we’ve made a satisfactory case to him – he gets us an invite upstairs to meet direclty with the Minister of Social Development, who holds the highest office in the Province, something like a governor. This is great news. Muna and I follow Sam out of his office, and by this act Sam is adopted into our quest and ordained as our guide. Without him Muna and I are just random people in the hallway. We stroll through the almost-finished government building, which like most government offices outside Kathmandu has a concrete austerity produced by minimalist decoration and a building style that leaves stairwells in the open air. Even the walls look somehow unfinished, expectant.

At the top of the stairs we move down an echoey corridor and come to the mouth of a room crowded with men. Peering through the door frame, I see a tall, lean Official sitting at the other end of the narrow office, the throng of visitors clamboring for his attention. Sam and Muna and I are directed to the room across the hall to wait.

We wait. It is very hot.

After some time, we are brought back across the hall to the Minister’s office. It is stuffed with as many black faux-leather couches as the room will allow, and as per standard Important Office decorating style, they are situated perpendicular rather than parallel to the desk where the Official in question is seated. I can’t explain this, but it’s the set up of almost every Important Office I’ve been to in Nepal. The halls are empty and the offices are packed with extreme quantities of couches, which are almost always lined up along one wall so that visitors find themselves talking to the Official they’ve come to see at an angle, while the Official gazes past their knees at empty space. A perk of today’s office is that, with the July heat pawing at the walls, the ceiling fan is turned on to the highest setting. I am seated directly under it. It feels wonderful for about ten seconds, and then I realize I am doomed to suffer in a singularized typhoon for the length of our Important Meeting.

The last of the previous visitors is just leaving as we get seated, and when the previous callers have cleared out, Sam introduces us to the Official. Muna and I – mostly Muna – describe Jevaia and explain the authorization letter we are looking for. We say are “seeking suggestions on how to properly coordinate and align with the new government.” We don’t say we are already pretty sure that these procedures are not defined yet; in fact, the inquiry itself is probably the best formal step available.

After some time, the Official falls silent. In my opinion, the Official Silent Phase is one of the great tests of mettle in this line of work, particularly for impatient foreigners. From a western sensibility it’s completely perplexing: for about five mintues, the Official taps on his laptop and gazes past our knees without saying anything. The fan blasts the top of my head and wooshes through my ears, and I command my self to sit properly through the Official Silent Phase, like Sam and Muna are doing, without fidgeting or asking to turn the fan off. Take note, impatient American Person With An Agenda. If you come here on a schedule, it will be silently and inexorably bled out of you. The people on the faux-leather couches don’t own this timetable no matter how bombastic and fantastic their ideas are, and let me tell you right now that nobody else is in a hurry. It never occurred to me I might need a jacket to get through our first Province government visit in the dead middle of the summer, but I surely wish it had.

Suddenly, the door flies open and an elderly man in traditional daura-suruwal dress walks through the door. He waves his walking stick at the foot of the couch.

I don’t have a picture of the Poet, so here’s an internet photo of a man in a daura surulwar.

“Son, get up and move over there, I’m just gonna have a seat,” the old man says to Sam, who graciously leaps up from the seat closest to the Official desk, and moves down the line of couches to a spot near the door. The old man sits down and leans in to the corner of the Minister’s desk with a twinkle in his eye. He begins reciting a legnthy poem.

The Official is, by old man terms, a junior “son” like Sam. In an instant, the hierarchy of the room is reorganized. The Official leans back in his chair with a grin and sets to listening to the poem. All of a sudden, we are all in school.

For forty five minutes–no, I’m not exaggerating–the Official and the Old Man engage in philosophical conversation while the fan hammers my head, Muna waits politely and Sam cycles through expressions of interest. I won’t find this out until after the meeting, but the old man is the son of a famous poet, and himself a reknowned scholar. More men–all men, Muna and are I the only women for miles around, it seems–wander in to the room to listen while he holds court. The poet leans dramatically forward and back on the faux-black leather couch, swaying to his recitations, swiveling his attention from the Official to us to other would-be meeting-seekers near the door, and unleashes a reverent Islamic lyric.

“So tell me,” our Official says, with somber studiousness. “I want to know something. You’re a Hindu man. But you speak eleven languages and you’ve studied Islamic poetry extensively. How do you reconcile those who eat cow meat?”

I shiver and try to casually hold my hair out of my eyes. I look enviously at a corner door, where more men are periodically filing in and out of the room, and notice that Sam seems distracted by the door too. Why can’t the Minister just tell us whether we can have a letter, or what we have to do to get it? Why can’t he release us from bondage, and THEN listen to poetry?

“Let’s have another poem,” the old man says. He turns to Muna, who, following Sam’s relocation, has ended up on the couch seat beside the Poet. Leaning toward her, the old man brightens, saying, “Would you like to hear a Hindi Poem?”

“Nobody properly understands Hindi,” the Official interjects, boldly. “How about a Nepali poem.” I am well aware that we will need to hear all the poems if we want to find out about our letter.

Another gaggle of men comes out of the corner door, and suddenly Sam says, “let’s go.” Go where? I chatter. The Minister hasn’t answered our question yet. I’m confused.

“This way,” Sam says, motioning toward the corner door. Why are we leaving? But with no choice, I get up and follow Sam and Muna through the mystery door. We enter the next room, and there, in a grand office, behind a hefty wooden desk flanked by the National flag, sits the actual Minister of Social Development. She rotates on her chair, adjusts her sari over her shoulder, and waves us to sit down on two spacious couches where she can examine us directly from across the carpet.

Who was that guy? I whisper to Muna. Suddenly I am afraid I’m about to start giggling uncontrollably.

“The Secretary,” Muna mutters.

“So,” the Minister of Social Development commands, wasting no time and leaning forward on her clasped hands. “Who are you?”

….so I got behind on Aamaa-Rama, the epic (obviously) recounting of Aamaa’s journey to visit us in America last fall. Now I’m catching up months later, which is a thing to never do–the whole point of keeping a blog is that even though you think you will remember things just as you felt them in the moment, nobody does. Anyway, now it’s 8 months later and you can’t miss Aamaa’s visit to America, so we just have to make do.

When last I left you, Aamaa had buckled herself in to my friend Catherine’s Mini-Coop and rolled out from my house in Connecticut with Bishnu to shift to my parent’s house in Maryland. My parents, for their part, have been to Kaskikot in 2003 and 2010. And Bishnu has been in the US since the start of 2009. Which means that since our early twenties, Bishnu and I have slept in each other’s childhood beds and grown up a second time in one another’s families, learning a new language over dinner plates on each other’s tables (or kitchen floors, as it were), gaining autonomy over time, absorbing the values and habits of one another’s households. So even though my folks and Aamaa have only met twice, they share a peculiar confidence, forged in a wormhole that compressed an enormous distance in to the finest intimacy—parenthood.

This has manifested in odd bits of cross-pollination. For example, the first time my parents and brother came to Kaskikot, which was well before cell phones or Internet, they stayed for a week. When they were leaving, Aamaa came out to the road to see them off. She stood up on a high terrace near Butu boujou’s house and waved her arms back and forth like one of those people with the reflective orange vests who directs airplanes on a tarmac. In the absence of another common language, my parents lingered in the road and returned the movement, swinging their palms back and forth over their heads dramatically: TEN-FOUR AAMAA, COPY, WE HAVE REACHED THE ROAD, WE ARE CLEARED FOR WALKING TO NAUDANDA. This gesture was then adopted in to our family lexicon for momentous goodbyes. For example, when I back out of the driveway in Bethesda to go to Connecticut, my mother stands in front of the garage and waves both arms back and forth over her head: FAREWELL, DAUGHTER, OFF YOU GO TO A FAR AWAY PLACE CALLED CONNECTICUT.

It was hard to picture Bishnu and Aamaa turning in to my parents driveway in Catherine’s Mini-Coop. Bishnu and I are like zipliners, swinging between two distant worlds connected by a suspiciously unbreakable cable. For me Aamaa’s arrival had the feel of an asteroid collision, primal, made inevitable a long time ago by gravitational forces in a distant solar system. And it happened. Our planets crashed together. Bishnu sent this wonderful piece of documentation, complete with garage:

Over the next few days, Bishnu took Aamaa to the National Zoo, to McDonalds, to her office, and to monuments all over Washington D.C. In the evenings, we would video-chat over dinner in my parents recently renovated kitchen, where Aamaa was eating all sorts of new foods cooked in a variety of contraptions such as the oven or on the electric stove in nonstick pots. And it quickly became apparent that if Bishnu and I thought we were running this show, our mothers were going to overtake us in imminently.

By the time I came to town a week later, my Mom and Aamaa had built a solid telepathic bond over topics such as whether Bishnu and I are eating enough, why we live so far away from them, and how unmarried we are. It didn’t matter what language these topics came up in (which they did extremely frequently) or which mother started it. The other mother would just inexplicably pipe up in her own language with reinforcing material. Since to our knowledge Aamaa only knew how to say “light” and “good morning” in English, and my Mom’s Nepali vocabulary consists solely of “chicken,” “buffalo,” “rice,” and “delicious,” this was confounding. It would go something like this:

The day I arrived, Bishnu was out with Aamaa most of the day, and I confess now that I was in a high-stress state. I’d only been home from Nepal for about a week, my graduate program was starting again in a few days along with a 25-hour-a-week internship, and a Situation came up that set off a fluorescent, strobing life-anxiety. My head hurt, my heart was racing, I demoralized and tired. All day, I dealt with The Situation while Bishnu took Aamaa to the Washington Monument.

That evening Aamaa and Bishnu arrived home. They had already been in Maryland for a week, but with my arrival that morning it was the first time we were all together in my parents’ house, and instead of being totally in to the momentous occasion I was exasperated and upset about The Situation. I went upstairs to my childhood bedroom and found Aamaa lying in bed with Bishnu, resting in the fading light after their long day of adventuring. I flopped down with them, and they asked after The Situation, and I filled them in, and they told me not to worry and reassured me that of course I was right and the world was wrong, and all would be okay. Bishnu reported that, unexpectedly, Aamaa had rather taken to McDonalds. Then the door creaked open, a bar of light fell in from the hallway, and my Mom poked her head through it.

We scooted over and my Mom wrangled bum-first on to the bed with us. The four of us arranged our entangled limbs on the puffy comforter. Night edged in. Without ceremony, the outside world fell away and I felt the collapse of time and space that is unique to parents and children and to long, long distances completed. And then a blossoming awe. How were we here together, like this? Nobody can sit at one end of a road and plan a route that ends in this place. We were somewhere that can’t be reached using the mind. With a jolt of clarity I saw the whole geography of it, like a continent, a huge swath of my life that is navigated only by the heart, which brought me to this shore. I felt us safely encompassed by an endless higher wisdom.

It was dark now, save for the bar of light from the hallway. The Situation shrank and became a hard, rocky thing shooting pain in to my foot, low and dense and false. It was not the real thing.

“Can you imagine,” Aamaa said in Nepali, “how nice it will be when there are more grandchildren? Like Ricky’s.”

“They’re always going and living far away, ” Mom added in English. “They should stay near their mothers.”